Sanjit recognized him from the photo on the bank’s website: Raymond Li. He was attired in a tailored Ralph Lauren business shirt and pleated grey trousers, a Rolex gleaming on his wrist. More impressive in the flesh, as he radiated a certain charisma that could never be captured by a camera.
He smiled at Sanjit and carried on. Sanjit’s eyes stayed with him as he marched briskly toward a white door, his entourage struggling to keep pace. The encounter, however brief, was reassuring, as Sanjit realized that he wasn’t dealing with a hashish-smoking sadhu, but the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, covered head-to-toe in designer gear.
“Ticket number seventy-eight to counter five,” came the announcement.
Sanjit glanced at his ticket. It was him.
A woman in a red uniform greeted him at a service desk, not thin, not fat, not fair, not dark, not pretty, not ugly. Ordinary in every respect, the sort of unthreatening ordinariness that put people at ease.
“Welcome to Bank of Eternity. I’m Sheetal, your afterlife consultant,” she said, flashing an air-hostess smile.
“I think I saw your boss back there,” Sanjit said, gesturing to the waiting area.
“We are truly blessed to have him in our midst,” she gushed. “I’ve never met anyone so spiritually connected with the universe. If Buddha were a businessman, that’s how he’d be.” She appeared genuinely in awe.
“What’s he doing here?”
“He’s come to inaugurate our Nariman Point branch. He wants to focus on India, as it’s our biggest market after China. Our product is really taking off here. Cricket stars, Bollywood actors, business tycoons, politicians. They’ve all got Afterlife Dollar accounts.”
Sanjit nodded, impressed.
“So what can I do for you today?” she asked, joining her red fingertips on the desk. He instinctively checked for a ring. She wasn’t wearing one.
“I’d like to know more about Afterlife Dollars.”
“Is this for you?”
“For my mother,” he said after a pause. “She’s ill.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Okay. Let me start from the beginning. As Hindus, we’re taught that after we die, our souls are judged by Yama, the god of death. If we’ve performed enough good deeds, we’re sent to heaven. If not, we go to hell, right? While this is true in principle, it’s also a gross oversimplification of the truth.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“How many people do you think die every day?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. A few million?”
“Tell me, logically, is it possible for one person to judge all of them?”
“I guess not.”
“So, logically, the thing to do is to outsource this function. A system of judicial courts has been set up for this purpose. Your first major expense in the afterlife is to find a lawyer to fight your case. And lawyers, as you know, aren’t cheap.”
“Wait a minute. Are you saying there are courts up there, just like here?” He pointed to the ceiling first and then the window.
“Kind of. You have Lord Yama sitting on top like the chief justice.” She drew in the air with her finger. “Under him you have the lesser gods serving as judges in the various courts. Then you have the lawyers, advocates and—”
“Tell me,” he interrupted. “Will a good lawyer get me off the hook if I’ve committed a load of bad deeds?”
“It depends.”
“What if I’ve murdered someone?”
She laughed. “I’m sorry. You don’t look like a murderer to me. A little wicked, maybe.” A twinkle in her eye. “But definitely not a murderer.”
The remark caught him by surprise. Not that he wasn’t used to being flirted with, but he hadn’t expected it from her. He cleared his throat.
“Hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically?” A pause. She appeared to be weighing up her words. “No judicial system is perfect. Every now and then, a criminal will get away and an innocent man will be wrongly convicted. As a company, our job is to make sure everyone has the means to afford the best possible defense. Besides, no one’s one hundred percent good or evil. There are so many grey areas when it comes to morality. And what makes it even more difficult is up there, the burden of proof is on you, not the prosecution.”
Sanjit nodded. Good answer.
“So what happens when I win my case?” he asked.
“You go to Indraloka, abode of Indra, the king of gods.”
“What’s that like?”
“It’s like a resort. Except your holiday lasts forever.” She beamed at the ceiling, as if picturing said holiday.
Sanjit scoffed, “So the king of the gods is actually a glorified hotel keeper?”
“I understand how this goes against everything we’ve been taught,” she said, her smile undimmed by his skepticism. “But that’s exactly what makes our product so innovative. We’ve finally managed to penetrate the truth about the afterlife. I mean, logically, if our spirit is our true nature, then why should the next world be so different?”
It was the third time she’d said “logically.”
“Okay, logically, how much am I going to need?” He winked.
“Three hundred thousand Afterlife Dollars should buy you a competent lawyer and a one-bedroom apartment in Indraloka,” she said, missing his jibe.
“And what if I don’t have this money?”
“One of two things. You roam the netherworld—”
“And what does this netherworld look like?”
“A million times worse than Dharavi,” she said, referring to the sprawling slum in the heart of Mumbai.
“And what’s the other thing?”
“You return to the earth and start again. But you can avoid all this for three hundred thousand—”
“Please don’t take this the wrong way. But how do I know any of what you’re saying is true?”
“Honest answer? You don’t. You just have to have faith.”
“Faith.” He laughed bitterly. “Every time I’ve had faith, I’ve been rewarded with nothing but disappointment.”
“Mind if I ask you something?” she said.
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
Sanjit stiffened. Was it that obvious?
He wanted to say he was fine. But he’d left it that split second too late to lie.
“Motor neurone disease.” He sighed. Once again, stripped down and laid bare in front of a stranger.
“I’m sorry. My aunt has it, too,” she said softly. The glazing of sympathy in her eyes triggered a craving. Nothing sexual. Just a longing for the comfort only a woman could provide. He imagined lying on her lap while she planted a gentle kiss on his forehead, whispering that everything was going to be okay.
He felt a prickle in his eyes as if dust had got in. He rose at once.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, startled by the sudden movement.
“Gotta go,” he blurted. “Another appointment.” Storm clouds had gathered in his eyes. He needed to get out before the downpour came.
“Think about it,” she said to him as he was leaving. “Freedom from unhappiness, from the disease. Forever. You owe it to yourself, Sanjit. After what you’re going through.”
8.
IN THE TEA ST ALL DOWNSTAIRS FROM ALI’S FLAT, the kerosene stove roared, and fluorescent tubes bled anemic light. Sanjit scraped a stool back to sit, startling stray dogs nibbling on food scraps.
It was past midnight. A veil of smog had settled on the street. The silhouette of the minaret towered over a sleeping neighborhood.
“Salaam alaikum, Sanjit bhai,” a voice greeted behind his back.
It was Karim, the waiter, standing over Sanjit with a stack of cups balanced in his hand. His skeletal frame hunched slightly, as if being dragged down by the weight of his long silver beard. His face was dark and looked withered by a lifetime of hardship. Yet it always wore a benign smile.
“What’s the matter? Can’t sleep
?” he asked.
“The universe is messing with my head.” Sanjit sighed.
Karim looked at him with eyes that seemed to see more than what lay before them.
“I don’t know if I can solve your problems. But I can fetch you a cup of tea. Would you like one?”
“I’d love one.”
After Karim left, Sanjit was momentarily distracted by a drunken argument at the next table. Then his mind returned to the problem keeping him awake. You could say it was a crisis of faith, or rather lack of it. Until that day, he was sure there were no gods, no afterlife. When he died, his body would be cremated on a bed of sandalwood logs, the ashes then scattered in a river, becoming one with the industrial effluents that floated in it. But his firmly held convictions had been challenged by another possibility.
Yamaloka. Indraloka. Why wouldn’t the gods leave him alone in death? But maybe it was foolish expecting them to. Especially if they’d had a hand in his birth. Well, at least according to his mother, they had.
For many years, her attempts at bearing children had been frustrated by one miscarriage after another. Fearing she’d be shunned by her in-laws for her inability to bear a child, she’d visited practically every temple within a hundred-kilometer radius of Mumbai, harassing the gods with the tenacity of a door-to-door salesperson.
A few weeks after a trip to a temple in Igatpuri, she discovered she was pregnant with Sanjit. Of course, the credit didn’t go to the doctor who performed the endometrial surgery that allowed the pregnancy to blossom. Rather, it went to the goddess in the temple. And every year, Sanjit’s mother made a pilgrimage to express her gratitude, dragging him in tow.
“She’s the reason you’re here,” she’d tell him, as she forced him to bow to a statue wrapped in a gaudy silk sari.
He remembered opening one eye furtively, wondering how an object devoid of life could breathe it into another. Never mind. When you were a child, you accepted everything you were told. But when you grew up and thought for yourself, everything started to unravel: lies, myths, illusions. They seemed so stupid, you wondered how you could’ve believed them in the first place.
For Sanjit, you could say that moment came when he learned about the appropriation of the family land in his ancestral village. For centuries, the six-hectare plot had been deemed worthless because of its distance from the river. The only way to water it was to urinate on it, his uncle used to say. But the construction of a canal in the mid-1980s changed everything. Suddenly its value increased several hundredfold, and everyone wanted a piece of it, including the local zamindars, who one day put a fence around it and claimed it as theirs. His family tried everything to get the land back, but discovered that they possessed neither the money nor the influence to take on the usurpers. The police, who’d been slipped several backhanders, looked the other way. When Sanjit’s family resorted to legal action, the subordinate court judge threw out the case, declaring the original land titles invalid.
From then on, the more Sanjit saw of the world, the more he was convinced that the gods who were supposed to administer justice and fairness were a total escapist fantasy, like a Bollywood movie. The real world, it seemed, was ruled by principles like “dog eat dog” and “might is right.”
Over the years, life continued to grind away at his faith and finally, a few weeks earlier, what little was left of it was shattered by his diagnosis. How could one possibly believe in any kind of god after that? So if he was so sure that gods didn’t exist, then why this doubt now? What was it about his visit to the bank that opened the back door for them to return and torment him?
“Masala chai.” Karim’s gentle voice interrupted his thoughts.
“Do you believe in God?” Sanjit asked.
“I pray five times a day,” Karim replied.
“And what has it got you?”
The waiter appeared amused by the question. “You don’t pray to get something.”
“Then what do you pray for? Bismillāh ar-Rahmān ar-Rahīm. Isn’t that how you Muslims begin your prayer? ‘In the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful …’ How can you recite this day in, day out when there’s little evidence of either compassion or mercy? When life’s basically shit?” Sanjit frowned.
“We pray for strength and wisdom to make the right choices. Goodness is a muscle, and prayer is the exercise to strengthen it. That’s the point of prayer. Besides, who says my life is shit? I eat three times a day and get to meet people like you.”
Sanjit scoffed, “I wonder if you’d feel the same if you had cancer.”
“I can’t answer that, because I’ve been blessed with good health. All I can say is you’ll never understand the will of God with that logic.”
“Then what kind of logic will I understand it with? It seems absurd to even speak of God and logic in the same sentence.”
“The logic of kindness and compassion. You see God with your heart, not your head.”
“Have you seen God? If so, I have a few things to say to Him,” Sanjit hissed.
“It takes prophets many years of striving to catch a glimpse of the divine. You think people like me can see Him just like that?” Karim said with a benevolent smile.
Sanjit rolled his eyes. Just the kind of fatalistic claptrap he’d been hearing all his life. Why did he bother? Did he really expect a waiter at a tea stall to reveal the secrets of the universe?
A drunk voice yelled impatiently for Karim. He gave Sanjit’s shoulder a gentle squeeze and left.
Relieved to be on his own, Sanjit blew into the steaming glass to cool it. The storm from his mouth sheared and rippled the surface of the liquid.
He took a sip and grimaced at its sweetness. What was Karim trying to do—give him diabetes? He poured the tea into the drain by his feet. One disease was enough, thank you very much.
He left some money for the bill and departed. After walking two steps, he suddenly stopped, the answer presenting itself when he wasn’t looking for it. The problem lay not in the idea of God per se, but in the definition, he realized. The belief in a Santa-Claus-type benefactor might be impossible to sustain in the face of the evidence presented by reality, but a different type of god had been revealed to him that day at the bank: God the bureaucrat and businessman. Yama oversaw a vast judicial enterprise. Indra was a resort owner. That was why there was no compassion in the universe. Because the gods were more interested in process and bottom lines than ensuring justice, fairness and equity. That was why the rich could literally get away with anything, whether it was the zamindars in his village or in the courts of Yamaloka. Entry to heaven was granted to the wealthy, just like the Willingdon Gymkhana club. Ultimately, money ruled. Of all the theories he’d heard on the subject, this one made the most sense.
9.
SANJIT’S BANK WAS INSIDE A BLUE BUILDING with a streaked glass door. He walked past a long Formica counter manned by comatose staff, heading straight for the ATM. The machine swallowed his card and a few seconds later, his balance glowed on the screen.
One point one million rupees.
The exchange rate of Afterlife Dollars according to the website was one, which simplified the math considerably. One point one million Afterlife Dollars. Nearly four times more than the three hundred thousand he’d need for a happy afterlife.
Pleased with this discovery, he retrieved his card from the machine and hurried toward the exit. As soon as he stepped onto the pavement, he was accosted by a leper. Sanjit recoiled when he saw the outstretched hand. The fingers, scabbed and deformed, were like ginger roots joined to the palm. The face looked as if it had melted in extreme heat and coalesced into a shape that was barely human.
But a few moments later, this revulsion transformed into something else. Call it competitive spirit. He couldn’t help wondering who was worse off, him or the leper? A disease that destroyed you from inside versus one that turned you into a hideous freak on the outside?
Mmm. You could argue both ways.
But the
matter was resolved when Sanjit spied a handful of coins in the leper’s begging bowl. Not enough to buy three hundred thousand Afterlife Dollars. Not even close. But Sanjit, on the other hand, had the money to get into Indraloka. The celestial holiday resort. Was it like the one in Goa he’d been to the previous year with Jaspal, Tony and Ravi? he wondered. Air-conditioned villas kitted out with big-screen TVs and spa baths, infinity pool lined with frangipanis and bougainvilleas, girls in bathing suits, warm sea and cold beer, all-you-can-eat buffets. And eat all, they did. They drank, smoked joints and sang songs. Imagine an eternity of that.
Sanjit threw a few coins in the leper’s bowl and darted across the road to the bus stop, getting there just in time to catch a red double-decker. As he searched for a seat onboard, a voice inside his head tried to counsel him over the din of the midmorning traffic and the conductor’s ticket clipper.
What if it’s a hoax?
In that event, yes, he’d have been duped. But the only person who’d be worse off was his mother, who’d have lost her inheritance.
On the other hand, if it wasn’t a hoax and he didn’t have Afterlife Dollars, he’d be consigned to a slum or forced to come back to earth.
Nothing to lose. Everything to gain.
Twenty minutes later, he was walking through the sliding doors of Bank of Eternity. He was about to take a ticket when he caught the eye of the girl who served him the day before. She motioned him to come over to her desk.
“Welcome back.” She greeted him with the air-hostess smile again. They exchanged pleasantries as if they were old friends.
“So what have you decided?” she asked after he sat down.
“I’m going for it,” he said, voice strong and determined. No more doubt. No more cynicism. This was it.
“Great. Let’s get you set up.”
She took down his details and entered them on the computer. His heart ran as he watched her red fingertips dance on the keyboard. This wasn’t just about his afterlife, he realized. It was also a “fuck you” to the disease.
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